Erich von Manstein: Hitler's Master Strategist

CONTENTS

Introduction

I. From the Imperial Army to the Reichswehr

II. The Wehrmacht: Army of the Third Reich

III. Manstein and the March to War

IV. The Polish Laboratory

V. The Manstein Plan

VI. Disgrace and a Dramatic Turn of Events

VII. The Incomplete Victory of the Sickle Cut

VIII. Between Two Campaigns

IX. The Conquest of the Crimea

X. The Wehrmacht and the Genocidal War in Russia

XI. Manstein, the Eleventh Army in the Crimea, and the Final Solution

XII. The Winds of Berezina: The Stalingrad Tragedy

XIII. From Retreat to Backlash

XIV. Clash of Titans: The Battle of Kursk

XV. Manstein and the Military Resistance to Hitler

XVI. The Legend of an Honorable and Upright Wehrmacht

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Field Marshal Erich von Manstein

National Archives

INTRODUCTION

Could one consider the German field marshal Erich von Manstein the greatest operational genius, if not the best strategist, of World War II? Although this may be the opinion of numerous specialists in the field, an understanding of his role in German military history remains to this day rather limited in the West. One could explain this by a certain centro-Americanist perspective, which has primarily focused on the West European and North African theaters of operations. Since the majority of Manstein’s military achievements occurred on the battlefields of Bolshevik Russia, Anglo-Saxon and French historians have accorded him only the smallest amount of interest, in comparison, for example, to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, whose principal military exploits took place in France and North Africa. However, relatively speaking, the latter had military responsibilities much less important than those of Manstein, given that the outcome of the war was decided on the Eastern Front, where the German Army had concentrated the largest proportion of its effort and suffered 85 percent of its losses, thus making Russia the tomb of the German Army. ¹

Even if the majority of Western specialists recognize the primacy of the Eastern Front, it has not necessarily inspired the analysis of their works, which explains to a certain extent why Manstein’s military role, for example, during the Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–43, remains to be fully defined. One could make a similar remark regarding his role on the Western Front, for a debate exists as to whether or not he was truly the author of the Sickle Cut Plan (Sichelschnitt), the basis of the Wehrmacht’s lightning victory over the French and British armies in May and June 1940.

Be that as it may, leading military historians almost unanimously consider Manstein the greatest strategic talent and the cleverest practitioner of mobile warfare among the German generals of the Second World War. His understanding of the operational dimension of modern warfare, which in particular involved the dualistic relationship between armor and combat aircraft, and his capacity for improvisation and flexibility during unforeseen events, made him the most talented of the Wehrmacht’s senior officers and the most feared by the Red Army’s high command. A master in the art of commanding audacious offensives, and surprise and violent counterattacks, he was also able when necessary to orchestrate vast, methodical, and well-ordered withdrawals.

In his work The Other Side of the Hill, drawing from conversations and correspondences with German generals who were prisoners of war after 1945, the eminent military historian Basil Henry Liddell Hart writes: The ablest of all the German generals was probably Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. That was the verdict of most of those with whom I discussed the war, from [Field Marshal Gerd von] Rundstedt downwards. He had a superb strategic sense, combined with a greater understanding of mechanized weapons than any of the generals who did not belong to the tank school itself. Yet in contrast to some of the single-track enthusiasts he did not lose sight of the importance of improving alternative weapons and defense. He was responsible, shortly before the war, for developing the armoured assault gun, which proved invaluable later. Liddell Hart confirmed this perspective several years later in his monumental History of the Second World War, underscoring there that Manstein was considered by his friends to be the best strategist among the young generals. ²

Another military historian of great standing, John Keegan, estimates that Field Marshal Manstein possessed one of the best military minds in the Wehrmacht. In Christian Schneider’s view, Manstein was so brilliant that he was unanimously recognized—as much by his comrades-in-arms as by the military experts of Germany, as well as by both the victorious and neutral countries—as the most competent German general of the Second World War. Hitler himself considered Manstein the best brain that the staff has produced. David Irving goes so far to declare that Hitler’s respect for General von Manstein’s ability bordered on fear. Such a fear is without a doubt explained by Manstein’s personal ambitions and the authority which he enjoyed within the officers’ corps. Von Manstein, asserts Albert Seaton, "was indeed very ambitious, a man of operational genius whose great abilities were clouded by a pose of arrogance and conceit; he wanted the powers of a von Hindenburg and the fame of the elder von Moltke, with a unified Oberkommando with himself at its head." ³

In the preface to the 1958 English edition of Manstein’s Memoirs, volume one, Liddell Hart writes: The general verdict among the German generals I interrogated in 1945 was that Field Marshal von Manstein had proved the ablest commander in their army, and the man they had most desired to become its commander in chief. Richard Brett-Smith agrees wholeheartedly when he states that Manstein would have been accepted by all of the generals on the Eastern Front to fill the post of commander in chief with full operational authority. Von Manstein, he adds, was the greatest German general of the war, and probably the greatest of any participating nation. ⁴

Many generals of the Wehrmacht shared this opinion, beginning with von Rundstedt, the eldest of the German field marshals. Colonel General Heinz Guderian, patriarch of the panzer divisions (Panzer divisionen), stated that Manstein was our most brilliant operational brain. Generals Walther Warlimont and Günther Blumentritt both asserted that he was the most brilliant strategist of all our generals, while General Siegfried Westphal declared that: […] of all the general staff officers, von Manstein possessed the greatest strategic and military talents overall. With an eye on all of the possibilities of the future, always full of new ideas that were good and often brilliant, he was an organizational genius and a difficult subordinate, but a generous superior. He was also always among the first when the interests of the army were at stake.

Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, who was profoundly jealous of Man stein, corroborated this perspective, writing in his Memoirs while awaiting his Nuremberg trial these highly revealing words: I myself advised Hitler three times to replace me [as the army’s chief of staff] with von Manstein [...]. But despite his frequently expressed admiration for Manstein’s outstanding talents, Hitler obviously feared to take such a step and each time he turned it down; was it sheer indolence on his part or some other unvoiced objection he had to him? I have no idea. ⁵

If anyone could have led a successful military revolt, it was Man stein, asserts Samuel W. Mitcham, referring to the immense respect that the field marshal earned in the Wehrmacht, and implying by that very fact why Hitler so feared him. Was Manstein not undoubtedly Germany’s most significant personality in the Second World War, as Andreas Hillgrüber, one of the most distinguished military historians, suggests? ⁶

By virtue of his numerous military feats, Manstein equally merited the respect of his adversaries, such as the Soviet marshals Rodion Malinowski and Kyrill Kalinov. After the war, Malinowski spoke of Manstein in a most laudatory fashion: We considered the hated Erich von Manstein as our most dangerous enemy. His technical mastery of everything, of every situation, was unparalleled. The situation would have perhaps become nasty for us if all the generals of the German Army had been of his caliber. For his part, Kalinov held very similar views of Manstein: In the club, we often discussed the merit of the highest ranking German commanders. For many among us, the bastard Erich Lewinski, a.k.a. von Manstein, was the most dreaded. His army group appeared unbeatable to us, his technical qualities incomparable, and his understanding of our country exceptional. If all the German generals had been comparable to him […]. ⁷

His great strategic talent nonetheless provoked animosity and jealousy on the part of several colleagues both in the OKH, such as its commander in chief, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, and its chief of general staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, as well as in the OKW, such as Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff, and Colonel General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations bureau, which undoubtedly prevented him from attaining more important decision-making posts throughout the course of his career. He was equally under-appreciated by various members of the Nazi Party hierarchy, whether it was by Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring, who was Hitler’s prince and commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, or the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and the Gestapo.

Despite his great admiration for the field marshal’s military competence, the Führer feared his independent spirit and his strong character, which explains why he refused to entrust to him Brauchitsch’s position, after he had dismissed the German Army commander from his duties in mid-December 1941 due to his failure in Operation Barbarossa. Moreover, it is for this reason that the Führer relieved Manstein on March 30, 1944, after one of his most beautiful military operations, from the command of Army Group South.

Beyond Manstein’s personal feats, a look at his career provides a new perspective on the nature of the war, particularly the war on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union, which is the primary focus of this study on the field marshal. The dominant historiography on the Second World War has recognized for half a century that Germany’s objective in launching the war was the conquest of Lebensraum, living space in the East at the expense of the U.S.S.R., and the destruction of part of its population, in particular the Jews and those representing the Bolshevik regime. However, it has only been in approximately the past ten years that these histories have taken into account studies claiming that the Wehrmacht participated, as a fully-committed member of Hitler’s state, in the preparations for the wars of aggression, through the army’s own actions and the criminal operations of the National Socialist regime. The army was thus not an entity separate from the Nazi apparatus, but rather an instrument that had voluntarily placed itself as an ally in service to the party.

There existed, therefore, a completely natural sense of community between the majority of the senior leaders of the army and those of the Nazi regime. Like members of the National Socialist Party, the military was against liberalism, democracy, Socialists, Communists, pacifists, and Jews. On the one hand, they favored the return of a strong authoritarian regime to Germany, permitting Hitler to rise to power and to overturn the republican system, and on the other hand, the restoration of a powerful army endowed with offensive capacities. Their common objectives included the destruction of any constraints upon German sovereignty imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, the formation of a unified Reich created by the annexation of Austria (Anschluß), the disappearance of Czechoslovakia and Poland, and above all the conquest of living space in the Soviet Union, necessary to make of the German Reich a great continental and autarchic power. They were, indeed, allies sharing common preoccupations and perfectly compatible worldviews, particularly regarding the political-strategic objectives in Eastern Europe. In short, the Nazis and the army formed a mutual alliance and became veritable accomplices.

However, the political and ethical responsibility of the Wehrmacht during the Nazi period has most often been eclipsed thanks to the Cold War and the demands of German rearmament, under the framework of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which necessitated the re-enlistment of former soldiers having served in Hitler’s army. It should be stated that the support of qualified persons in the institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany, as in the bureaucracy, the justice department, the universities and, beginning in 1956, the Bundeswehr, necessitated a rather obvious discretion from the moment it became an issue of determining political and penal responsibility for the actors of the National Socialist era. This of course gave license to the senior officers of the Wehrmacht, in particular those who participated in the conscription of the Bundeswehr troops, to cast an unapologetic image of their own history. ⁸

More than any of his peers, Manstein influenced, through his testimony and postwar Memoirs, historians who, drawing on theories of totalitarianism, had a tendency to render Hitler alone responsible for the war and the crimes committed during its course. In his Memoirs, there is absolutely no mention of the war of extermination against the Jews, officers of the Red Army, or Soviet prisoners of war, despite Manstein’s active involvement, particularly in the Crimea. He chose instead to emphasize the actions and sacrifices of his soldiers during the war. ⁹ During the trial of the major war criminals before the Nuremburg International Military Tribunal, Manstein, as a witness, presented himself as guarantor of the Wehrmacht, attempting more than anyone else to exonerate the general staff and the high command of accusations of having formed a criminal organization.

It is thus hardly surprising that he became, after 1945, one of the principal moral pillars of Wehrmacht integrity. Nevertheless, he was condemned at Hamburg on December 19, 1949, by a British military tribunal to 18 years in prison for his role as commander in chief of a region of the U.S.S.R. where grave acts of brutality had been committed, particularly against prisoners of war. He was then released on May 7, 1953, one year after having received leave for medical reasons. Some in West Germany thus thought that he had been no more than a victim of victors’ justice, included in a collective punishment, and not a war criminal as such. This thus explains why he participated, at the request of the West German government, in the supervision of the reconstruction of the German Army in 1956.

Consequently, the predominant tendency of the historiography on Manstein is to this day an assemblage of works in his defense, dealing with his various military accomplishments and his glorious feats of arms. This trend neglects the political and ideological aspects of the conflict, which are essential for an understanding of his true nature. And when these two aspects are examined, it is generally to assert that the field marshal should not be associated with the criminal dimension of the war, for the facts would demonstrate that he is beyond any suspicion. Furthermore, did Manstein not include among his critics Himmler and Goebbels, who reproached him for his disinterest in the Nazi cause, as well as for his origins, partly Slavic, if not Jewish, like 150,000 other Wehrmacht soldiers? But is the pertinent question not to know whether his military exploits are separate and distinct from the known issues of the war on the Eastern Front?

Manstein always insisted that the German Army had no share in the Nazi crimes, since they had been committed by units of the SS and SD. He claimed that the army was unaware in general of what was happening behind the front, i.e. the nature and scale of these crimes, but expressed its disappointment when it had knowledge of certain offenses. However, there is no longer any doubt today that the majority of the high-ranking officers who served on the Eastern Front collaborated closely with the police units of the Nazi regime who were in charge of the elimination or deportation of Soviet prisoners of war, political commissars of the Red Army, partisans, and Jews. The senior officers of the Wehrmacht, including Field Marshal Manstein, could not have remained ignorant of what was truly occurring. And since he was a key commander on the Eastern Front, a reappraisal of the postwar perceptions of his role is required.

In spite of the fact that he seems not to have been a true Nazi, Manstein nonetheless gave certain orders that encouraged his troops to commit criminal actions at the expense of the political commissars of the Red Army, partisans, and Jews. For example, it was under the title of commander in chief of the Eleventh Army in the Crimea that he ordered his soldiers on November 20, 1941, to vigorously support the policy of extermination of the Jews, demanding their understanding for the severe punishment to be inflicted, since the Jews were considered the spiritual representatives of Bolshevik terror. Since such a directive resulted in only further bolstering his troops’ morale and their desire to fight, the field marshal appeared all the more guilty of the war crimes committed under his command in the Soviet territories.

Manstein knew full well that it was impossible to make a career for himself in a totalitarian regime without a degree of compromise, even more so in a regime which he and his German Army colleagues had decided to support as allies, even if they did not approve of all its policies. Consequently, Manstein intended to respect the oath of allegiance that he had declared to Hitler in the summer of 1934, a form of submission deliberately chosen and suggested by leaders of the Wehrmacht, future field marshals Werner von Blomberg and Walther von Reichenau. All throughout the war, Manstein remained faithful to the spirit of alliance which bound the army to the regime; he remained consistent with the choice that had made, i.e. to serve his country and his Führer to the very end. For him, the soldier was in service to the politics of the state, and it was his duty to restrict himself to military matters. One can thus better understand his refusal, in the winter of 1943, to follow Major Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and Colonel Henning von Tresckow, leaders of the military conspiracy against Hitler, and then to consider, in the summer of 1943, an invitation from Field Marshals Günther von Kluge and Erwin Rommel, as well as from Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff, to take leadership of the Wehrmacht following a coup d’état that would have rid Germany of Hitler and his Nazi regime.

Manstein was affiliated with a group of talented senior officers who were greatly encouraged by the arrival of the Hitler regime. The massive rearmament and the expansion of military contingents had accelerated his promotions. Moreover, he was well integrated into the officers’ corps which was preparing the war, and clearly part of the dominant mind-set of the state. As such, the letter that he wrote on July 21, 1938, during the Sudetenland Crisis, to Colonel General Ludwig Beck, chief of the OKH general staff, in which he stated his insistence upon the necessity of eliminating Czechoslovakia, is both significant and loaded with meaning.

A great military figure, but a man who lacked a razor-sharp political sense, Manstein was very much representative of the GermanoPrussian military caste of his time. It is thus through him that the destiny of other high-ranking officers who fought during the Second World War, particularly on the Eastern Front, stands out. From here we may understand the importance of a biography on this figure who served his Führer until the very end. Indeed, a study of Manstein’s indulgent behavior with regards to Nazi abuses of power, during and after the war, further permits us to understand why the German Army voluntarily allowed itself to become the instrument of Hitler’s expansionist policy. Such a biography is not only important for the history of the war and for the operational knowledge of an exceptionally talented strategist; it also permits us to penetrate into the world of thoughts, conceptions, and psychology of a high-ranking officer who played a key role in the preparation and supervision of the wars of aggression, in addition to the war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht on behalf of the National Socialist regime.

I

FROM THE IMPERIAL ARMY TO THE REICHSWEHR

Until the final collapse of the Third Reich, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein remained loyal to Adolf Hitler, his Führer, to whom he had pledged his oath of allegiance. He thus refused to join the ranks of the military opposition who wanted to assassinate Hitler and overturn the National Socialist regime so as to spare Germany the worst that was yet to come. While he admittedly distanced himself from his Führer after the war, he nonetheless continued to present himself as an advocate of the Wehrmacht and its actions. Manstein’s family origins, education, and professional development permit us to understand the behavior and attitude of this figure who was very much representative of the Germano-Prussian military caste of his time, of which he was its most accomplished product. Equally so, they allow us to bring to light his indulgence for the abuses of the Nazi regime and his acceptance of Hitler’s expansionistic policy.

Family environment and education

From a very early age, Erich von Manstein had been destined to lead a soldier’s life, if only because of his family origins and his education. Born in Berlin, on November 24, 1887, he was the tenth child of General Eduard von Lewinski and the fifth child of the latter’s second wife, Helene von Sperling. Her younger sister, Hedwig von Sperling, was married to Lieutenant General Georg von Manstein, with whom she had no children. In accordance with common practice at the time, the Lewinski couple had decided to entrust their next child to the Manstein couple. Thus even before his birth, it was agreed upon between the two families that Erich would be adopted at the moment of his baptism. And so, on the day of this religious ceremony, Fritz Erich Georg von Lewinski took the family name von Manstein.

Both his birth and adoptive parents were born into aristocratic Prussian families who had military traditions dating back several centuries. The two families included among their forebearers officers who had served Prussian kings for several generations. In fact, to be more precise, the military traditions of the Lewinskis and the Mansteins dated back to the Teutonic knights. And so it was that certain ancestors of Erich thus guarded the European borders in the thirteenth century. On the Lewinski side, as on the Manstein side, sixteen of his ancestors were officers who had served in the military, whether it was for the kaiser or the czar. The Lewinski family alone had provided the German Army with no less than seven generals throughout the course of the twentieth century. General Eduard von Lewinski, Erich’s natural father, was an artillery officer who would climb the military echelons up to the rank of army corps commander. His adoptive father, Lieutenant General Georg von Manstein, was, in turn, an infantry officer who would become a division commander. The Sperlings also came from a distinguished military family of the Prussian nobility. Erich’s maternal grandfather, Oskar von Sperling, was a general, as was the brother of his natural and adoptive mothers. Furthermore, the youngest sister of his birth and adoptive mothers was the wife of the future field marshal and president of the Reich, Paul von Hindenburg. Although the adoptive father of Erich von Manstein belonged to the Prussian nobility, he was not a landowner. Nevertheless, Georg von Manstein lived in comfort ever since his family and that of his wife received an endowment for services rendered at the time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, during which time his father had commanded an army corps, and his father-in-law had held the office of army chief of staff. Granted by the Reichstag, the endowment had guaranteed the Mansteins and the Sperlings financial independence by supplementing their salaries paid by the army.

The family environment of young Manstein thus destined him to a military career, all the more so since his father would provide him with an education straight from the tradition of the Prussian officers’ corps. The environment in which I grew up, he remarked after the war, was the world of the Prussian soldier. [...] One can thus suppose that a certain military inheritance had been bestowed upon me. He then added: It is not surprising that, from my most tender childhood, I wanted to become a soldier. ¹⁰ He would thus be raised, at both home and at cadet school, in accordance with the traditions and general moral code of the old Prussian military caste, to which it would be necessary to add a strong Lutheran puritanism.

From cadet school to the Imperial Army

Erich von Manstein was a child of delicate constitution. Yet, after having studied for five years at a Strasbourg high school where his father had been posted, in 1900 he entered, at the age of thirteen, the Royal Prussian Cadets’ Corps, first in Plon, then in Berlin. He remained there six years, a time during which his constitution strengthened to the point that when he entered the army in 1906, he was provisionally declared suitable for active service. During his time in Berlin, which lasted four years, he was appointed, as a member of the nobility, to the pages’ corps in the court of Kaiser William II.

Exerting a substantial influence over the old German Army, the Royal Prussian Cadets’ Corps was founded in 1717 by King of Prussia Frederick William I, who had decided to combine Berlin’s various military academies into a single cadets’ corps for boys between the ages of eleven and eighteen, and to place it under the nominal command of his son, the future Frederick the Great. Originally, admission was reserved only for the nobility. But this had hardly changed by the beginning of the 20th century, for the majority of cadets were still born into the families of Prussian officers and civil servants, as well as the Junkers, those local squires of the East. The primary mission of the cadet institution was to provide the necessary education to the young members of the nobility who aspired to become officers. Within the established curriculum, military training was only one facet among others, such as the instruction of academic subjects or the meaning of honor and duty. Indeed, emphasis was placed upon the development of character in order to create a harmonious combination which would include the best aspects of physical, academic, and religious education. Training quite obviously insisted upon loyalty towards the person of the emperor. Young Manstein and his classmates were thus educated in an environment where unconditional and chivalrous loyalty towards Germany prevailed, where the motherland was personified by the monarch, the supreme warlord. In the second volume of his Memoirs, Manstein recounts his years spent in the Royal Prussian Cadets’ Corps with a certain amount of nostalgia. A sense of honor and duty, uncompromising obedience, and camaraderie were the principal values instilled in him and which, in his mind, molded his character in a highly positive way. ¹¹

Manstein was intelligent and capable of quickly mastering a subject. Furthermore, his report cards indicated that he could attain higher results if he were to apply himself more and take better advantage of his talents. In 1906, after having passed the exams required to enter into the cadets’ academy at Lichterfelde, he was appointed as ensign to the prestigious Third Prussian Foot Guards Regiment. Stationed in Berlin and reserved almost exclusively for members of the nobility, the regiment included among its ranks officers who would play a key role in the history of their country, such as the future field marshal Paul von Hindenburg, commander in chief of the Imperial Army from 1916 to 1918 and president of the Reich from 1925 to 1934; the future lieutenant general Kurt Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord, commander in chief of the army from 1930 to 1934; the future lieutenant general Kurt von Schleicher, chancellor and minister of the Reichswehr during the last year of the Weimar Republic; and the future field marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, commander in chief of the army from 1938 to 1941. And so at the age of nineteen, Manstein began his military career in earnest. For him, however, being a soldier was much more than a job. In fact, for him it was nothing less than a raison d’être intimately linked to his world vision.

The following year he was promoted to the rank of second lieutenant and became, by default, an officer of the German Army. In 1913, he entered the Kriegsakademie (War Academy) in Berlin where he underwent officers’ general staff training, which he was unable to complete due to the outbreak of the First World War. The best mind that the general staff has produced, as Hitler would one day declare apropos of Manstein, would thus never have at his disposal, during the course of his military career, a general staff officer’s training in due form.

At the beginning of the war, Manstein was promoted to lieutenant and served as adjutant in the 2nd Guard Reserve Regiment, first in Belgium, then in East Prussia, and finally in Poland. It was with this unit that he served on the Western Front, in the Battle of the Marne and in the capture of Namur, and in the East, in the battle of the Masury Lakes which, along with the Battle of Tannenberg, definitively halted the Russian advance into East Prussia and brought fame to his uncle, Field Marshal Hindenburg, commander in chief of the Eighth Army. In November 1914, Manstein was seriously wounded in a hand-to-hand battle in Poland by two bullets: one lodged in his shoulder, the other in his sciatic nerve. Despite the injury, he returned to service at the end of spring 1915. Attached to General Max von Gallwitz’s army group, under the title of staff officer, he participated in the German offensives in northern Poland and Serbia. Promoted to the rank of captain in the summer of 1915, he served as adjutant at the headquarters of the Twelfth Army. In 1916, he served as staff officer, first in the Eleventh Army during the Battle of Verdun, then in the First Army under General Fritz von Below, the commander in chief, and Major General Fritz von Loßberg, chief of staff during the Battle of the Somme. The following year, he became a staff officer in charge of operations for the 4th Cavalry Division in Estonia and in Courland, which at this particular moment was fighting against the Bolsheviks. Beginning in the spring of 1918, he took on the same duties for the 213th Infantry Division deployed on the Western Front. He was thus able to take part in the massive German offensives of May and July, as well as in the decisive battles of Reims and Sedan. He served in this theater of operations until Germany signed the Armistice on November 11, 1918.

During the course the war, Captain Manstein was awarded two great military distinctions: the Iron Cross (First Class) and the House Order of Hohenzollern. Although he had not commanded any troops during the war, he nevertheless had the opportunity to demonstrate, within the scope of his various duties as a staff officer, an exceptional tactical talent and a remarkable understanding of the needs and demands of the high command at the time of an offensive. Even though he was only an adjutant of a rifle battalion, he had already proven the vast potential of his military talent. He was the best adjutant I ever had, his commander later declared. ¹²

The Reichswehr during the Weimar Republic: A state-within-a-state

Because of their social class and the education they had received in the cadets’ academy—and also in the Kriegsakademie for certain ones among them—Prussian officers like Manstein were not in a position to understand the true causes of the events that took place in Germany in November 1918. Whether in the cadets’ academy or in the Kriegsakademie, their education was essentially based upon an apprenticeship of military tactics, military history, armaments, fortifications, railroads, mathematics, physics, geography, and finally, military discipline. Little importance was granted to other disciplines, such as language, economics, or political and social science. German military education clearly demonstrated its insufficiency with regards to officers in the age of industrialization and, in particular, of mass armies and industrial wars. In a rather paradoxical way, the industrial revolution, Socialism, and parliamentarism were concepts poorly understood by the officers, even as economic, social, and political factors had enormous impact on the role of the armed forces within the state and society. They were thus incapable of understanding the actual causes of the events of November 1918, believing rather that the war had been lost because of influential factors they hardly understood and which they had learned in the army to hold in contempt: Socialism, liberalism, democracy, parliamentarism, and behind all of this, the Jews. Refuting modernism, confining itself to a reactionary traditionalism, the officers’ corps had remained a state-within-a-state, which is to say an institution at the service of the king and his kingdom, not belonging to any political parties or society. ¹³

Like his army colleagues, Manstein was thus profoundly and deeply distressed by the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy. For the officers, he recounted after the war, such a loss not only constituted a simple change of regime, it caused their very understanding of the world to dissolve. And just like his ancestors, Manstein had taken an oath of allegiance to the King of Prussia. It was precisely this oath of loyalty to the king that in Manstein’s opinion was the foundation of a soldier’s sense of duty, not the abstract idea of state or people. Bound unconditionally to the person of the king by an oath of allegiance, the army, up to that point, seemed no longer conceivable without a monarchy. With the revolution and the Armistice, wrote Manstein, his military youth came to an end. Rather than to the Kaiser, he added, the soldiers were henceforth obliged to take an oath of allegiance to the Reich, a concept which he described as abstract, indeed mythical. ¹⁴

As was the case for the majority of the officers, the Weimar Republic would remain foreign to Manstein. The German nationalist right considered this political regime a product of defeat and a foreign body imposed upon the German nation by the victorious powers. This same conservative right reinforced the discredit of the Republic by insisting that Germany had not been militarily conquered, instead crediting the idea that the army had been stabbed in the back by the socialist democrats, the Communists, and the Jews. Like his colleagues who had served the Kaiser, at least those who came from the nobility, Manstein would remain nostalgic for the Prussian monarchy and the central position formerly held by the army within the imperial regime. ¹⁵

Regarding parliamentary democracy, Manstein’s opinion was hardly positive. In volume two of his autobiography, he provides his perspective of the German state during the period of the Weimar regime: It proved to be, neither more nor less, than the puppet of political parties and interest groups. It represented less a genuine authority than an apparatus used to implement all the upheavals. Moreover, its form unquestionably did not find its authority in the will of the majority of the people, but from the consequence of defeat, and the resultant wishes of the conquering enemies. In his view, parliamentary democracy was thus synonymous with political instability and a regime that could not win the acceptance of the general populace and which, in addition, attempted to rule without true authority. After attending a meeting of the Reichstag under special invitation, he would even reveal having been disgusted by the indignant squabbles of the parties. ¹⁶

Despite his profound aversion to the Weimar Republic, Manstein would remain loyal, particularly during its first tumultuous years. Following the example of the large majority of his colleagues in the officers’ corps, he remained faithful to the oath of allegiance that he declared not to the president of the Republic, but to the Constitution. Accordingly, he approved his superiors’ decision not to offer their support to Wolfgang Kapp. The latter, in March 1920, had attempted a coup in Berlin to overthrow the Weimar regime, with the assistance of the commander in chief of the northern armies, General Walther von Lüttwitz, and Captain Ludwig Erhard, chief of a freikorps of 6,000 men that had just returned from the Baltic. The attempt had been made with the agreement of General Erich Ludendorff, formerly the assistant to Field Marshal Hindenburg when he was at the head of the German high command from 1916 to 1918. Concerning this event, Manstein wrote after the war that to support the Kapp Putsch would have not only been totally contrary to the tradition of the German soldier, but would have seriously compromised the army’s position vis-à-vis the people, because for them, the soldier’s role was not only to defend the homeland, but also to preserve order and authority within the state. He also explained that the decision of the Reichswehr—the name of the small German army born out of the Treaty of Versailles—not to intervene on the part of the putschists was out of a fear of provoking, on the one hand, division within the troops, or perhaps even the disintegration of the army, and on the other, a civil war that could have led to chaos and a rise in Bolshevik sentiment within Germany. ¹⁷ This rationale, which had motivated him to oppose the Kapp Putsch, would essentially be the same that caused him to refuse to take part in the conspiracy against Hitler during the Second World War.

It is obvious that, like the majority of his officer colleagues, Manstein had been profoundly marked by the troubles at the end of the war, for example the November 1918 revolution that provoked the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy, or the Communist revolutions of the Spartacist uprising at Berlin in January 1919 and at Munich the following spring. He came out of this traumatizing experience filled with a powerful anti-Communist sentiment which, throughout the Second World War, would not only lead him to support, but also to actively participate in the war of annihilation and extermination undertaken by National Socialist Germany in Bolshevik Russia. Nevertheless, the freikorps or the army had interceded, at the demand of the provisional government, in each of the revolutions of 1918–1919 to crush the Communist revolutionary uprisings. From that moment on, it was clear that the existence of the young Weimar Republic depended more than ever on the Reichswehr. Not only did the latter appear as the ultimate recourse in case of internal crisis, but also as the guarantor of state and national unity.

Colonel General Hans von Seeckt, to whom was entrusted command of the army, had been opposed to any putsch, insofar as the Reichswehr’s autonomy was safeguarded within the new regime, the Weimar Republic, which he considered as an anomaly, since it was born out of military defeat and political collapse, and was moreover the symbol of the Treaty of Versailles. He thus endeavored to maintain the spirit of the old imperial army, in other words, creating out of this organization a state-within-a-state, independent of political power. He therefore considered it necessary for the new army to retain the monarchic spirit of the old officers’ corps.

In this respect, the young officer Manstein thought, just like Seeckt, that the fiasco of the Kapp Putsch, which had been defended by Generals Lüttwitz and Ludendorff, demonstrated that the officers’ corps should steer clear of the politics and instead prepare itself for the day where outside security would be entrusted to the new army. Like Seeckt—and the same would apply for the majority of his peers— Manstein believed that the primary role of the officers’ corps consisted in preserving the army as a safeguard for the protection of the nation itself and for the eventual resurrection of Germany as a great power. During the Second World War, when the conspirators approached him to gain assurance of his support for the attempt to rid Germany of Hitler and the Nazi regime, Manstein offered them nothing more than a straightforward refusal, not only stating the reasons that had motivated his behavior with regards to the Kapp putsch, but also presenting the argument that the soldier was in service to state politics, and that it was his obligation to restrict himself to military issues.

Obedience, loyalty, and a sense of duty, Manstein’s three principal virtues, would remain with him during his entire military career. He thus described his profession through the traditional ideas of simplicity and chivalry, as well as through his personal concept of military honor. To a certain degree, he saw himself as a descendant of the monastic military order of the Teutonic knights, proud of his motto knight without fear and without reproach. Whether it was for his extreme precision or for his discipline and strict character, he was a typical product of his environment. In fact, he was arrogant, intolerant at times, and even occasionally uncompromising with regards to discipline. However, he was very intelligent and possessed an exceptionally acute, clear, and sharp mind which relied upon, for the most part, his intuition. Authoritarian, distant, cold and reserved, he was nevertheless an emotional man who had learned how to master his feelings. Above all, he had a great strength of character, refusing to bow before his superiors when he thought he was right and they were wrong. Thus, in the eyes of his colleagues whose rank was higher than his, he appeared as impertinent, insolent, disrespectful and immeasurably ambitious. Yet, at the same time, such traits helped him to distinguish and bring attention to himself within the officers’ corps. Gifted with an unwavering self-confidence and a sense of superiority over others, as much with regards to his talent as his competence, he felt predestined from the very beginning of his career to hold the highest posts of the army, for reasons of prestige, no doubt, but also due to a motivation related to a profound desire to assume responsibilities of paramount importance.

The year of the Kapp Putsch also saw the marriage of officer Manstein to Jutta Sibylle von Loesch. On January 10, 1920, Manstein asked for her hand, only three days after having met her for the first time, during a hunting trip at Deichslau, in Silesia. The wedding took place five months later on June 10, at Lorzendorf, in the Namslau region of Silesia. They were a happy couple throughout their marriage, until the death of Frau Manstein in 1966. They had three children, Gisela, Gero, and Rüdiger, born respectively in 1921, 1922, and 1929. A lieutenant in the Wehrmacht, Gero lost his life on the battlefield in Russia, on the banks of Lake Ilmen on October 29, 1942.

Manstein’s father-in-law, Arthur von Loesch, was an aristocrat and landowner in the Namslau region, where he owned three estates: Lorzendorf, Hennersdorf, and Butschkau. The latter was located in a district named "Reichtaler Ländchen," which the Allies had granted to Poland under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. In the second volume of his Memoirs, Manstein expresses his rancor against the expropriation of the Butschkau estate and the amputation of part of Silesia to Poland’s advantage, a region which, in his opinion, never belonged to it and over which that country had no rights, from neither an historic nor ethnographic perspective. Concerning the people’s right to self-determination, he stresses, this region was purely German. Even within our own family, we too suffered the consequences of the Versailles diktat, he writes bitterly. ¹⁸ Furthermore, such resentment would explain, in part, his belligerent attitude during the preparations for the Poland campaign in the spring and summer of 1939.

The secret rearmament of the Reichswehr and preparations for the next war

In accordance with the Treaty of Versailles from June 28, 1919, Germany’s military power was severely diminished, its army having been reduced to 100,000 men, of whom 4,000 were officers. Composed of seven infantry and three cavalry divisions, and distributed among seven military districts (Wehrkreise), the army was henceforth conceived of as a small force of border guards or police in charge of maintaining order, all the while being forbidden to possess heavy artillery, assault tanks, or combat aircraft. Additionally, it was banned from an entire section of the national territory, i.e. the demilitarized zone that included the left bank of the Rhine, to be occupied until 1935, along with 50 kilometers of the right bank. One must thus recognize that the disarmament was never accepted by the majority of the German population and its political leaders, and even less so by the officers’ corps of the Reichswehr. As a result of the Treaty of Versailles, the disarmament appeared as an insult, as if the great nation’s sovereignty had been confiscated. Consequently, it could be nothing more than provisional.

Because of his exceptional military aptitude, Manstein was among the 4,000 officers retained to protect the traditions of the old imperial army. Major General Fritz von Loßberg, president of the commission in charge of designing an army that had been reduced to 100,000 men, called upon Manstein to assist him in this undertaking in Berlin. Former chief of staff to the First Army, Loßberg had a great deal of esteem for Manstein’s natural talents from the very moment he had worked under his direction during the Battle of the Somme. The officers working in the commission fulfilled their duties with the idea of rectifying and reconstituting a national army freed from any obstacle. For them, the new army had foremost to be composed of an elite group, an army of officers. Among the 40,000 officers of the interim Reichswehr of 400,000 men, which had emerged out of the defeat on the ruins of the imperial army, they had no difficulty in designating 4,000 officers to the new army of 100,000 men. These newly appointed officers were chosen particularly for their honesty, authority, and above all, their competence. In fact, several of the selected candidates were staff officers.

Colonel General Seeckt, as commander in chief of the army, endeavored to offset, organizationally speaking, certain constraints imposed by the victors. The creation of the Truppenamt (Troop Office) had the objective of replacing, clandestinely, the general staff which the Treaty of Versailles had dissolved. Manstein had not been able to complete his staff officer training at the Kriegsakademie in Berlin, and his only true qualification for the general staff was the experience he had acquired within various staffs during the war. But above all, it was essential for him to gain command-level experience. On October 1, 1921, he thus received command of the 6th Company of the 5th Prussian Infantry Regiment at Angermünde, in Pomerania. He held this command for the customary period of two years. On October 1, 1923, he was transferred to the staff of Wehrkreiskommando II in Stettin (Szczecin), then, on October 1, 1924, to that of Wehrkreiskommando IV in Dresden, where he taught military tactics and history for three years to the young officers selected to serve on the staffs. During this period, the course was no more than a pretext for the training formerly provided at the Kriegsakademie, the activities of which the Treaty of Versailles had prohibited. After having been appointed to major on February 1, 1927, he was selected to serve, beginning on October 1, on the staff of the Infanterieführer IV in Magdeburg.

On September 1, 1929, he was posted to the Reichswehr Ministry at Berlin. There he oversaw Group One of the T1 department, which corresponded to the operations department of the Truppenamt, i.e. the general staff. Under Manstein’s direction, Group One supervised the operations of the staff to the army’s commander in chief and distributed work to all of the troops. It also organized the Kriegsspiele (war games which consisted of performing maneuvers on maps) and educational lectures, which were part of the operational training for high-ranking commanders and staff officers.

Within the Reichswehr’s general staff, Manstein demonstrated a level of intelligence and competency clearly superior to that of his colleagues. His proposals often garnered the praise of his chiefs, thus leaving in the shade those put forth by his higher ranking colleagues, like Lieutenant Colonel Wilhelm Keitel, who would become the Wehrmacht’s chief of staff of the supreme command from 1938 to 1945. From this moment on, Keitel suffered a profound jealousy for the ambitious and talented Manstein, and their relationship amounted to nothing more than a reciprocal hatred until the end of the Second World War.

The high command of the Reichswehr recognized Manstein’s talent to such an extent that it relied more and more on his opinion concerning decisive military issues. In volume two of his Memoirs, Manstein expressed the great satisfaction that he felt for having his talent recognized for its true worth: For me, this success had the consequence of giving henceforth a certain weight to my opinion as a member of the operations department. ¹⁹

In his role as chief of Group One, Manstein developed the first mobilization plans for a Reichswehr of 100,000 men, at a time when the French Army was able to mobilize, with only a short delay, approximately thirty divisions, the Polish Army approximately twenty, and the Czech Army approximately fifteen. In order to confront the superiority of such enemies, he proposed to triple the number of infantry divisions from seven to twenty-one. For this he recommended, in accordance with accelerated training, that all enlisted men, officers or not, be able to assume in times of crisis the duties of two ranks superior to their own. However, the principal problem of expanding the number of infantry divisions did not stem from the training of enlisted men, but rather from the insufficiency of equipment and modern materials, despite a secret, limited rearmament initiated at the beginning of the 1920s.

Contrary to what has often been asserted, German rearmament was a reality long before Hitler’s arrival in power. From the very first years of the Weimar Republic, the Reichswehr, under Seeckt’s command, had proceeded with a discreet rearmament which benefited from the collaboration between German politicians and industrialists. The Reichswehr was developing prototypes of weapons prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles (tanks, combat aircraft, heavy artillery, etc.), which depended on German industry equipping itself for mass production in order to furnish, at the appropriate moment, the necessary armaments. Moreover, prototype fabrication on behalf of the Reichswehr expanded to other countries, not only in the U.S.S.R., but in Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and the Netherlands. However, the Rapallo Treaty of 1922 had finalized the details of the secret military agreement that the leaders of the Reichswehr had signed the previous year with their Red Army counterparts, without the German political authorities’ knowledge. The restoration of German military power, as a means to facilitate the revision of the Treaty of Versailles and the recovery of the Reich’s pre-war position was, since the beginning of the 1920s, the primary object of the military and many German politicians. One even envisioned the war as an instrument of foreign policy, once the Reichswehr regained its ability to launch offensives and circumstances were favorable.

The senior officers of the Reichswehr believed that war was a legitimate prerogative of the state’s sovereignty. They rejected, because of this, the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which condemned any recourse to war as an instrument of national policy. All things considered, the mentality of the generals had hardly changed since the time of Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke, chief of general staff of the Prussian Army from 1858 to 1888. In 1888, he described his world vision in the following terms: Peace is a dream […] and war is one element in God’s world order. In war, one finds the greatest of man’s virtues: courage, self-abnegation, sense of loyalty, and spirit of sacrifice. Without war, the world would succumb to materialism. At the beginning of the 1920s, Colonel General Seeckt, commander in chief of the army, abandoned pacifism, the League of Nations, and the principle of collective security based on a general disarmament to guarantee peace. My personal training prohibits me from seeing in the idea of eternal peace anything other than a dream […]. Lieutenant General Ludwig Beck, who would become chief of the army general staff after Hitler’s rise to power, attempted to justify the war when he wrote at the end of the 1930s: The last resort of the states in their mutual relations will remain in the future military power. He concluded logically: We are not able to eliminate war. ²⁰ In short, for the German officers, war was an historic fact of nature and, if it had not existed, it would have been quite simply necessary to invent it, for it was essential to any policy claiming to represent the interets of state.

Not only did the senior officers of the Reichswehr consider that another European war was inevitable, they deemed it necessary so that Germany could tear the Treaty of Versailles to shreds and find once again its genuine place in Europe. The army can have only one thing in sight, war, and not eternal peace, declared, as early as 1920, Colonel General Seeckt. In a secret document from the minister of the Reichswehr, dating from April 1923, it was indicated that the Reich could only recover its liberty and national independence, as well its economic and political power, through war. In December 1923, Lieutenant Colonel Schleicher, chief of the Office of Ministerial Affairs within the Truppenamt, defined the objectives of the military leadership: 1. Strengthen state authority; 2. rehabilitate the economy; 3. rebuild a military capability; all are prerequisites for a foreign policy that has the goal of creating a Greater Germany. In May 1925, another secret document from the Reichswehr Ministry bluntly stipulated: That Germany will in the future have to fight a war for its continued existence as a people and a state is certain. In a memorandum from March 6, 1926, Colonel Joachim von Stülpnagel, chief of the operations section of the Truppenamt, emphasized the importance of reinforcing the army, the instrument of expansionism responsible for recuperating territories that the Reich had lost through the Treaty of Versailles, of reestablishing German supremacy in Europe, particularly at the expense of France, and of preparing the ultimate battle for world domination against the Anglo-Saxon powers. ²¹

Recent research has demonstrated that the German generals had planned and prepared a new war well before Hitler’s accession to the leadership of the German state. In fact, the march to war began ten years prior to the National Socialists’ rise to power. The occupation of the Ruhr by Franco-Belgian troops in 1923, because of Germany’s nonpayment of reparations due in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles, left its mark on the spirit of the Reichswehr leaders to such an extent that they decided from that moment to devise an ambitious plan aimed at establishing a great army, even larger than the one that had served the Kaiser in 1914. It was Seeckt who conceived of the secret plan to increase the army’s offensive capacity to 2.8 million men, distributed among 102 divisions, under the command of 252 generals. Thus, on September 1, 1939, at the unleashing of the Second World War, the German Army indeed had at its disposal 2.8 million men, divided among 102 divisions, and at least 252 generals. It is interesting to note that it included among its ranks approximately 600,000 more men than the Kaiser’s army in 1914.

One should also recall that, at the time Seeckt drafted this secret plan, Hitler was serving his prison sentence at the Bavarian prison of Landsberg and was contemplating Mein Kampf. He never thought, when he came to power ten years later, that the high command of the Reichswehr would have already laid the foundations for the creation of a powerful greater Germany. Moreover, without the military’s preparation of a secret rearmament plan, it would be difficult to conceive that the Third Reich could have managed, in a period of only six years, to endow itself with a powerful instrument of war that would permit it to dominate the entire continent within the very first years of the war. One month prior to the launching of the Russian campaign, on May 26, 1941, an officer of the Wehrmacht accurately made the following remarks: When Hitler rose to power, he realized that the Reichswehr had already laid the technical foundations necessary to carry out a large-scale rearmament. It would thus be false to claim that the German generals would have wanted to develop nothing more than a military force with only a defensive role, and that Hitler, once in power, would have compelled them to create a war machine endowed with offensive capacities. ²²

At the time, Manstein was aware that the Reichswehr, despite the quality of training and the motivation of the troops, was not only incapable of supporting a conflict against France, but also of waging war against Poland or Czechoslovakia. An insufficiency of weapons and modern equipment limited their professional standards. Because of the restricted number of forces and the inadequacy of its equipment, the German Army was able to do nothing more at this time than conduct diversionary battles, with the results being inevitably disastrous. In order to overcome these shortcomings, Manstein reinforced the border defenses with coils of barbed wire, anti-tank ditches, and thick-walled concrete pillboxes.

Already able to speak French well, and having learned Spanish in the meantime, Manstein took advantage of the credits granted to the army meant to encourage officers to travel abroad. In 1931 and 1932, he traveled to the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1931, he accompanied the head of the Truppenamt, General Wilhelm Adam, to the U.S.S.R., where they visited the principal Soviet military installations. He also met commanders of the Red Army in Moscow and Leningrad, in particular the people’s commissar and defense deputy, General Mikhaïl Tukhachevsky. In the summer of 1932, he returned to the U.S.S.R., this time as General Adam’s official representative, and participated in military maneuvers in the Ukraine and the Caucasus.

These two trips to the U.S.S.R. intensified the flames of Manstein’s anti-Bolshevism. After the war, he recounted that returning to Germany brought about an even greater sense of relief knowing that Bolshevik Russia was not part of Europe. With regards to this, he wrote in volume two of his Memoirs: Even though the Soviet regime liked to refer to the Western ideas of Marxism and to eagerly acquire the latest technologies of the Western world, the Soviet Union was no longer part of Europe! The shadow of Asian despotism hung over the country, its people, and its events. ²³ But even more importantly, his visits into Soviet territory confirmed for him the image that the German officers’ corps had of the alleged despotic Asian tyranny, embodied particularly by the political commissars of the Red Army. In other words, his visits reinforced his prejudices in which the cadres of the Red Army and the Communist Party were for the most part Jewish, and which led him, during the Second World War, to support Nazi Germany’s war of extermination in the U.S.S.R. against the Jewish Bolshevik enemy.

II

THE WEHRMACHT: ARMY OF THE THIRD REICH

Like the majority of his colleagues in the officers’ corps, Manstein enthusiastically welcomed Hitler’s rise to power, the establishment of the National Socialist Party dictatorship, and the end of the Weimar Republic. If, for the aristocratic officers like Manstein, Hitler